Ronan Farrow says he was ‘threatened with a lawsuit personally’ by Harvey Weinstein, and that NBC passed on his story

Ronan Farrow said he was “threatened with a lawsuit personally by Mr. Weinstein” while working on his bombshell story that includes sexual assault allegations against the movie mogul.

And Farrow told Rachel Maddow Tuesday night that this was not an unusual occurrence.

“I will say that over many years, many news organizations have circled this story and faced a great deal of pressure in doing so,” Farrow told Maddow.

“There are now reports emerging about the kind of pressure news organizations have faced. That is real,” Farrow continued.

Farrow then discussed NBC’s decision to pass on his Weinstein story, and why he chose to bring it to The New Yorker.

Farrow, an NBC News freelancer and investigative journalist, spent months working on the story for NBC before he brought it to The New Yorker, he said.

And while an NBC network source told HuffPost that what Farrow had at NBC was “nowhere close to what ultimately ran in the NY Times or the New Yorker,” Farrow disagreed.

“I walked into the door at the New Yorker with an explosively reportable piece that should have been public,” Farrow told Maddow. “In fact, there were multiple determinations at NBC that it was reportable,” Farrow continued.

Farrow had also arranged for eight interviews on camera with accusers while working on the report for NBC News, according to an industry insider that spoke to The Daily Beast. (In The New Yorker article, Farrow spoke to multiple women on the record about their alleged experiences with the producer, including Mira Sorvino and Asia Argento.)

For weeks, Farrow and NBC producer Rich McHugh’s sources and scripts were subjected to intense rounds of fact-checking, and legal reviews at NBC News, according to The Daily Beast. But in the end, NBC was unsatisfied with the material and interviews procured by Farrow and McHugh.

What’s clear is that Farrow and NBC have distinctly different takes on why the network choose to pass on his Weinstein story.